RE: [motion-1] On path syntax

 

 


On Thursday, February 04, 2016 5:50 PM
Amelia Bellamy-Royds wrote summary of lots of things. 

 

Copying this to www-svg because it is relevant for SVG in general as well as FX.  Previous relevant discussion:

* "On path syntax" from public-fx, starting with Shane Stephen's questions here: 
https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-fx/2016JanMar/0023.html
* "SVG-ACTION-3834: Ask csswg if disallowing fill rule in path() for d is good" Comments by Dirk Schulze in response to the action notification on the internal SVG WG list: 
https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-svg-wg/2016JanMar/0006.html

* "Topic: initial value of 'd' property" at the Sydney Face to Face, 4 February 2016 Sydney time, starting 23:18 GMT on the IRC log: https://www.w3.org/2016/02/03-svg-irc.html#T23-18-02

Thanks Amelia!

 

Reading through, it seems clear that lots of people are working hard to make sure that SVG2 will remain somewhat palatable to those of us who actually like SVG. Thanks for the strong efforts by so many! Too bad that time rushes things along.

 

As the N working groups (it’s always a prime number, isn’t it?) sprinkling SVG into ever new places, think about path syntax and moving it into CSS and fx and such, I see that people are keeping an eye open to the notion that path syntax, might actually, one day, expand. I just hope that people do keep in mind that SVG 1.2 had in vector effects something called vePath (which Professor Moissinac has called “superpath”) [1] that allows for pieces of paths shared by adjacent regions (like borders on a map, or joints between parts of an animated figure) to be identified, and thence reused. Since <superpath> and equivalent functionality has been a part of SVG since 2003 (estimated from pub-date of SVG1.2 [2]), it is worth keeping in mind as things move forward, since the rationale for such a thing has merely grown, rather than evaporated in the intervening decade. 

 

I see that the folks thinking about putting path animation into CSS have remained cognizant of the potential growth over time, of path syntax. I should note that in addition to the topological and graph theoretic constructs intrinsic to <superpath>, additional abstraction of a topological nature will undoubtedly be suggested as SVG (or a suitably rich vector drawing standard with animation) becomes more widely known in the academic community, particularly in the topological and graph theoretic communities. Abstracting away the geometry to reveal the topological layer (somewhat akin to connectors) unveils a layer of semantics of relationship between inferential constructs (in the sense of the semantic web) for which the plane is a far better metaphor for implicative expression than text and hypertext could hope to convey. Please keep in mind that SVG1.1 (or even the more ambitious 1.2) was not an end-point in the description of plane geometry, and was but a hint of what spatial semantics could be.

 

One other quick note: I see that ya’ll seem to like the idea of moving public discussions of SVG to github. It is certainly a way to restrict public input, if that is a desirable outcome. 

 

Regards

David

 

 

[1] http://play.presetc.com/Xplay.asp?PUId=f6a7c052-6906-11e5-aae0-001cc0a62bc3 

[2] https://www.w3.org/TR/2004/WD-SVG12-20041027/